


A Flame in Time

by lotusorlilith



Category: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu | Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Genre: ArtStudent!Heloise, F/F, Ghost!Marianne, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27761851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotusorlilith/pseuds/lotusorlilith
Summary: Art student Heloise must unveil the mystery behind a nameless painting. She ventures to the island on which it was painted as strange things begin to happen.
Relationships: Héloïse & Marianne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Héloïse/Marianne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)
Kudos: 15





	A Flame in Time

**  
In a white dress, Heloise chases down the wooden stairs of an old mansion. Swift footsteps echo from the stairs below, but when she reaches the doorway, panting from exhaustion, the door has once again closed, the owner of the footsteps without a trace, leaving only a cluster of blue stars swaying to the rhythm of the tides.

“Same damn dream again,” Heloise sits up in her bed, for a moment she can still smell the ocean breeze. 

**  
Heloise sits on the starboard of a small wooden boat, her blonde hair floats in the sea wind of northwestern France. The night has arrived, the moon is dim, the ocean is cerulean and obscured by the fog. 

“There is no way you can be back on time,” Sophie yells at her through the phone, “Do you understand you are applying to the most prestigious art history program in the entire world?”

“I have to go to where it was born.” Heloise glances at a giant rectangular bag lying beside her, “I can’t find any information online, this painting is a total mystery. ”

“Then you shouldn’t have chosen it for your admission essay in the first place! If you don’t put it on their table in three days -”

Suddenly, a gale of wind blasts and the bag with the painting falls overboard. 

“My painting!” 

The oarsman is singing rock-metal with headphones on, unaware of her call. Heloise jumps into the water and holds onto the bag before she realizes she cannot swim. The tides squeeze her lungs from all around her, she cries out but inhales only seawater - until someone grabs her wrist and pulls her back on board. 

Heloise grasps onto the corner of her drenched bag, coughing and panting desperately. 

“Thanks,” says Heloise when she can finally see and talk. Feeling ice-cold, she flicks a lighter and warms her hands with the tiny flame. 

The oarsman finishes his song, turns around and gapes at her, “Wait, why are you all soaked?”

All of a sudden, Heloise freezes. In the eerie light of the flame, a brunette woman in an antique red gown appears on the bow of the boat. She ambles right through the blinding fog like an apparition, takes a seat on the center thwart, her face inches from Heloise’s, flames flicker in her green irises. 

“I finally know that you cannot swim.” The woman chuckles. Half of her gown is drenched too.

“W…What are you? A ghost, a fairy or a witch?”

“I’m a man, of course!” The oarsman declares loudly.

“I’m the memory of someone from a long ago. You can call me Marianne.”

The woman reminds Heloise of the painting. On the canvas, under the dark blue canopy, stands a young woman facing away from the painter, the hem of her dress afire. 

“You are the painter,” Heloise utters bluntly.

The oarsman laughs, “Of course, I painted that Kraken on the hull myself!”

“How do you know?”

“I paint too. I can tell from your looks. You are studying me.”

Abashedly, the oarsman stops staring at Heloise’s breasts.

Marianne gazes at her, curiously, “Why do you paint?”

“Because…”Heloise pauses, smiles a little embarrassedly, “That’s for another day.” She glimpses at the painting bag on her side, “Who is she?”

The oarsman sniffs himself, “Ha, I know you can smell her perfume! She’s this pretty lady I met at the crab market this morning, you don’t know if she’ll be the mom of my children!”

At this moment, the wind lifts the fog, and an island appears before Heloise’s eyes. A Baroque mansion stands over a precipitous cliff that rises high above the beach, shining of silvery moonlight. 

Excited, Heloise jumps onto the shallow and runs ashore. 

“Heloise.”

Heloise turns around. “How do you know my name?”

“This is an Uber boat, so your name is right here!” The oarsman flashes his screen. 

Marianne is silent, yet the flames in her eyes grow brighter. 

**  
Despite having a ton of questions, who can resist the charm of an 18th-century style feather bed? Heloise dwells in some sweet dreams before a quarrel in the adjacent room wakes her. 

“No.”

“The carriage to Milan arrives at dawn.”

“I don’t even know him!” exclaims a young woman. 

“Neither did I know your father when I first came here!” 

Holding a candle stand, Heloise sneaks into the starlit corridor. When she is about to knock on that blue wooden door, it bursts open, a young lady with a blue gown stomps out. 

“Hey!” Heloise calls out as she chases the girl down the stairs, onto the moonlit rocks and finally up the cliff, “Please stop, you’ll fall!”

The girl halts, so close to the brink, she almost floats in the air. She turns around to face Heloise, undulating in the chilly wind is her red hair, a fire that burns against a background of dark blue. 

“I’m sorry,” the girl says, soft like a sigh. 

The girl leans backwards and falls off the brink. Heloise thrusts forward, but her hand grips through the girl’s wrist like a spectre, she clutches only the empty air. 

Heloise sits up, panting. She hears sketching sounds. Marianne sits at her bedside, sketching on a piece of parchment with charcoal.

“That’s good art, but drawing someone in their sleep is kinda creepy.” 

Despite saying this, Heloise can’t help but smiles. The gloom from the dream dissipates when she meets Marianne’s eyes. 

Strange, isn’t it?

**  
Marianne wraps Heloise and herself with black scarves to fend off the harsh wind onshore, the dawn is breaking on the cliff.

“’ She reached out for his embrace and wished to hold him. Her poor hands clutched only the empty air…Eurydice fell back into the abyss.’” 

“Eurydice?” 

“Eurydice,” Heloise flashes the cover of her book, “Reminds me of that girl. This is where she fell. So your client killed herself?”

“That was her sister. Her death befell my client the same fate.”

“A fate to be married off to some stranger.” Heloise gazes down the cliff, “She was beautiful, lively, incredibly young. What is good is always fleeting.”

“No,” Marianne gazes into Heloise’s eyes, “Not everything is fleeting. Some feelings are deep.”

“I wish it were true. But it’s not.”

“Why?”

“Even with a lover as devoted as Orpheus, who would go to the Underworld in seek of his deceased wife, Eurydice still lost him forever, because Orpheus favors the poet’s choice over the lover’s choice. She fell back into the abyss, never to see him again.”

“That’s not true. After Orpheus too perished from this world, Eurydice reunited with her love, this time for eternity. Sometimes one just needs to wait.”

Heloise gazes back at Marianne, the first beam of the rising sun dances in her irises, “Is that why you are still here?”

“What do you mean?” 

“Waiting.”

Marianne looks away as if burned by Heloise’s gaze. She becomes more and more transparent as the sun rises from the bottom of the ocean.

“What was the first time she smiled at you?”

“By a bonfire,” Marianne responds without hesitation.

Heloise feels a strange ache as if flames burn in her chest. The words escape as she suddenly realizes, “You loved her.”

“I don’t see how you came to that conclusion,” Marianne breathes sharply, her cheeks turning glowy red.

“Someone remembers tiny details after two hundred years.”

“And someone remembers nothing,” Marianne utters stingingly before she disappears in the sun. 

**  
Heloise walks into the sea, but the fire in her chest burns even more fiercely as she submerges herself in the cold embrace of the tides. Those flames, set alight whenever she lays her eyes on Marianne, are just too vehement for the whole Neptune to extinguish. 

Soaked and frustrated, Heloise straightens herself and sees a cave under the cliff. She strolls into the cave and flicks the lighter in the dark. 

“Huh!” Heloise gasps at what she sees. The curiosity and lightheartedness in her eyes dim into grimness. 

**  
Marianne ambles into the room to find Heloise sits by the window, in her eyes, the sun sinks into the horizon. 

“How does it feel to lie to someone you love?” 

Marianne halts, “I…”

“She didn’t know you were a painter, did she?” 

“…No.”

“She refused the marriage, so you painted her in secret, beguiling yourself as her friend.” 

“I’m sorry,” Marianne whispers. 

“I was wrong. You were never in love with her.”

Marianne’s chest heaves, “I’m afraid I must disagree on this one.”

From behind a curtain, Heloise uncovers the portrait of a faceless woman in a green dress. 

“I know the strokes. It’s your work. Tell me, how could you be in love with someone who wouldn’t even show you her face?”

To her surprise, Marianne chuckled, “Open your book.”

“Why?”

“Open it.”

Intrigued, Heloise flips through her mythology book, “I don’t underst…”

She freezes, and, with her cheeks prickly and rosy-red, she looks up in haste that almost flings the book away, “Why are you showing me this?”

She got the book for three bucks at a campus book sale, a price so cheap because of a missing page. But now, lying on the missing page 28 a splendorous lady with messy dark hair, her green eyes glowing with audacious desire. 

A naked Marianne. 

“The day before I had to leave, she said she wanted something to keep her company. ”

“So you drew her a naked portrait of yourself.”

“The face is mine, but the body is hers.” 

“She must have been very beautiful.”

“The most beautiful in the world,” Marianne smiles, caressing the curves of the girl with her finger.

“But you gave her up.” 

Marianne takes a deep breath, her fists clench. 

“How do you know we didn’t fight it? How do you know we didn’t run away?” 

“Because when I asked about the lie, you touched your forehead. When I uncovered the portrait, you raised your eyebrows. And now, troubled by what I just said, you are breathing through your mouth.” 

Marianne gazes at Heloise, flames ablaze in her eyes. She storms out of the room; her gown stirs up a fiery breeze. 

Heloise stares at the nude woman on her lap. Abruptly, she tears the page, leaving only Marianne’s head on it. Her fingers trace the curvature of a strand of those dark, hard-to-tame hair before she tosses the book away and buries her face in her palms. 

**  
The moon is at its highest in the night sky. Heloise sits by the furnace, scrutinizing the piece of parchment with a sleeping herself on it. 

Her eyebrows crunch into a frown. She adds two strokes onto the lips to make them fuller and erases a shadow in the outer corner of her left eye. Shaking her head, Heloise picks out a crayon to give the girl eyes as blue as the ocean. For a few seconds, she seems content, but that smile quickly diminishes as she finds that her cheekbones are one percent too masculine. 

Heloise recalls the longing, the enchantment and the occasional sadness in Marianne’s eyes whenever she talks about her client. What was that girl like? When Marianne confessed to her, did she blush demurely, covered those luscious red lips with her tiny hands before fainting out of joy, the way old movies portray 18th-century mademoiselles like her?

Heloise heads out to the corridor. The mansion is huge, but it does not take long before she knows she is in the right room. A sleek green gown hangs in the closet, the silk still shimmers like a flowing stream. A black convent robe lays on the windowsill, the hem of the dress carbonized and smells like burnt. There is a bed, clean but messy as if the young lady has just got up and the maid hasn’t had the chance to tidy it up. Everything in it screams of her, as if the door can fling open any second, letting in a yawning girl just back from her negligibly brief trip to the dining room. 

Heloise’s vision blurs when her fingers encounter a strand of blonde hair lying between the keys when she sits down at a harpsichord. She begins to play a piece that floats to the surface of her mind. 

A storm is coming, she hears the tiny creaks of the insects as they become agitated. A streak of lightning struck through her closed eyelids. Her taste buds shriek of the sea. 

Heloise finds herself sitting on the balcony of an Italian-style theatre, surrounded by the aristocrats of 18th century Milan. Tears run down her cheeks as the symphony rises to a crescendo, but Heloise cannot help but smile. She is in the client girl’s memory again. How can one ever be sad when she has had Marianne’s undying love?

As if by a divine calling, Heloise turns around to find a woman, facing away from her, exiting through the back of the balcony. Heloise squeezes her way through the crowd and runs down the stairs. As she takes each step, the walls around her and the stairs under her feet distort and shift, as if she is travelling through unknown times and spaces. The footsteps of the woman are one floor below her, the click-clack of her heels on wood has never been so real. When she reaches the end of the stairs, Heloise finds herself in a doorway of the mansion by a cluster of blue star flowers. She looks down and sees herself wearing a white wedding dress. For the first time since childhood, she sees the woman in her dreams. 

Heloise shouts, “Turn around!” 

The woman turns around, her green eyes widen as Heloise’s lips press tightly against hers. 

A rough and passionate kiss. 

Sadness rises from the bottom of Heloise’s heart like freezing blue tides. What is she doing? Hiding in a dream, disguised in the body of a dead girl just to steal a kiss from her lover’s lingering memory?

Ashamed, Heloise bites hard on Marianne’s lips when they parted. This is the last taste of you I will ever get. Now I should wake up. 

But when she opens her eyes after the kiss, she hears the gentle rumbling of the waves, feels the softness of sand under her feet. She stands on the beach, her arms lock Marianne in an embrace. 

Marianne’s eyes still widened from surprise, “You…”

Shocked, Heloise mumbles, “What did I do?” 

“You ran to me in this white dress, and…”

“And kissed you,” Heloise interrupts bluntly.

Marianne gazes at her, a streak of blood oozing from her lips. She stands there motionless, her eyes devoid of emotions. Heloise’s heart sinks, a flame buried in the deepness of the ocean. 

“I’m sorry I bit you, I don’t expect you to love me back. I’ll leave at dawn.” 

Heloise loosens her grip and turns away, at which moment she hears, “Look.”

Heloise turns around. A flame grows in Marianne’s eyes, a reflection of a giant bonfire that appears between them out of thin air. A circle of women around them, dressing in 18th-century robes, chant an eerie acapella. 

When their chant culminates in a whispering Nos resurgemus, Heloise looks down and discovers a flame nibbling the hem of her dress. 

Marianne stands near the sea in her half-drenched red gown. Heloise suddenly recalls that two nights ago, when she runs ashore from the boat, Marianne says - 

All of a sudden, the vicissitudes of two lifetimes struck her like a storm. 

Heloise runs through the bonfire, the illusions of the women and the fire shatter on her trail. She jumps into Marianne’s embrace and snugs her face on the brunette’s collarbone. 

“It was you. I remember it now. I started painting because I wanted to capture the face of the person running down the stairs before me, whose face I was never quick enough to see. I saw you that day on the balcony. I tried to chase you after the concert, but you walked too fast. Page 28 is missing because I burned it with my body.”

Marianne whispers, “That was bold of you.”

“Being lived all my life on a serene hill covered in blue star flowers, I wanted it to at least end in red. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I…”

Heloise feels Marianne’s hand slipping out of her grip. Marianne is becoming transparent again. But it is midnight.

“What’s happening?”

Marianne gives Heloise a gentle kiss on the forehead, “The purpose of one’s lingering memory is to pass it on to the person intended. Once is that purpose is fulfilled -”

“No, no!” Heloise exclaims, “I’m still here, the real you must also be somewhere in this world.”

“Not everyone has the luxury of a next life,” Marianne smiles, a teardrop disappears before Heloise’s fingertip touches it, “Don’t regret. Remember.”

Heloise reaches out for Marianne’s embrace again, wishing to hold her, but her hands clutch only the empty air. She falls backward as if into an abyss. 

**  
The admission officer stares at Heloise through her metal-rimmed glasses.

“According to this hospital in France, you were found unconscious on the beach of an island. You said that you were there for research, but that island has been deserted for over two hundred years, after a devastating fire wiped out the mansion that once stood on it, along with the last of the aristocratic family that owned it.”

“Yes,” says Heloise.

“Your doctor writes that you wouldn’t stop staring at the painting until night fell.”

“I was waiting for the painter.”

“If you did do your research, you should know that she has been dead for two hundred years.”

“No,” Heloise takes a step forward, “She’s right here in this room.”

“What do you mean?” The officer looks around, her breath sharpens as Heloise’s face is inches from hers.

Heloise smiles, takes a step back, and uncovers the portrait behind her.

“In the painting.”

The left half of the painting remains unaltered; that flame ablaze on the young lady’s dress. But on the right side stands another woman, one with undulating dark hair and a gown red like a bonfire. 

“I waited and waited until I realized that she was gone. So I painted her. Do you want to hear a story she told me?” 

“Might be a good story, but you are too late.”

Heloise makes another forward move, “She told me it’s never too late. Just like Orpheus and Eurydice, lost lovers find their way back eventually.”

The admission officer takes a hasty step back, her back bumps against the wall, “Altering the painting isn’t allowed. I would like you to leave.”

“Then I would like the answer to a simple question. Marianne Merlant submitted all her work under her father’s name. How do you know the painter was a she?”

Heloise grabs her stuff, and, when she is about to exit through the door, she hears - 

“Turn around!”

“No,” Heloise whispers as the woman behind holds her breath, “I’m not making the poet’s choice again.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please excuse my potentially weird word choices and grammatical errors; I swear my English is getting better now hahaha!


End file.
